Terminology Thread (or "name that pattern")

I would love a name for this too since the observation is important for why 'small' differences in means for normally distributed populations can have large consequences, and this occurs in many contexts (not just IQ or athletics).

Also good would be a quick name for log-normal distribution-like phenomenon.

The normal distribution can be seen as the sum of lots of independent random variables; so for example, IQ is normally distributed because the genetics is a lot of small additive variables. The log-normal is when it's the multiple of lots of independent variables; so any process where each step is necessary, as has been proposed for scientific productivity in having multiple steps like ideas->research->publication.

The normal distribution has the unintuitive behavior that small changes in the mean or variance have large consequences out on the thin tails. But the log-normal distribution has the unintuitive behavior that small improvements in each of the independent variables will yield large changes in their product, and that the extreme datapoints will be far beyond the median or average datapoints. ('Compound interest' comes close but doesn't seem to catch it because it refers to increase over time.)

I've suspected for a long time that that was the insight Carl Sagan had while high and showering with his wife:

I can remember one occasion, taking a shower with my wife while high, in which I had an idea on the origins and invalidities of racism in terms of gaussian distribution curves. It was a point obvious in a way, but rarely talked about. I drew the curves in soap on the shower wall, and went to write the idea down. One idea led to another, and at the end of about an hour of extremely hard work I found I had written eleven short essays on a wide range of social, political, philosophical, and human biological topics. Because of problems of space, I can’t go into the details of these essays, but from all external signs, such as public reactions and expert commentary, they seem to contain valid insights.

(It is a little interesting, & amusing, to see someone inferring the "invalidit[y] of racism" from an observation more often used as a justification for racial hereditarian attitudes!)

Eliezer called this believing in the should-universe.

Incidentally, this expression is very intuitive and has an amazingly low inferential distance. Multiple times IRL and online I would reply to someone "it's too bad we don't live in a should-universe" in response to a should-statement, and my reply is instantly understood, without having to explain much, except maybe saying "the should-universe is an imaginary one where what you think should happen actually does, every time".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wishful_thinking or perhaps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem ?

Related notion: in the humongous SSC post Reactionary Philosophy in an Enormous Planet-Sized Nutshell, the section "Reach for the Tsars" deals with proposals to solve problems which could only be implemented by dictatorial fiat, and describes it as a "czar's-eye view" solution.

Expecting different emotions than the ones actually observed looks to me like typical mind fallacy.

"Red flag" isn't exactly what you want but has served me well enough in similar conversations.

That's similar but possibly not the same as the Gell-Mann amnesia effect.

but at one point it put forward the proposition that the value of libraries are completely incalculable and beyond measure

This could also just be rhetorical. Almost any sufficiently long argument will contain some really wrong or dumb elements, but most will contain some that simply aren't meant to be taken literally.

If you like. I'll change "rules" to "suggested format in the post.

Oh god, it's following me.

...ahem. Strictly speaking, a trope is a storytelling device -- a more-or-less stereotyped pattern that an author uses to express theme or symbolism or compactly illustrate character or plot. (There's an even narrower definition, too, but that's the common one.) TV Tropes' habit of giving real-life examples is therefore improper.

This would be something more general, and I'm not sure English has a word for it.

An argument that halts in disagreement (or fails to halt in agreement) because the interlocutors are each waiting for another to provide a skillful assessment of their own inexpertly-referenced media sounds a lot like a software process deadlock condition in computer science. Maybe there's a more specific type of deadlock, livelock, resource starvation, ..., in the semantic neighborhood of your identified pattern.

Dropping references, while failing to disclaim your ability to evaluate the quality and relevance of topical media, could be called a violation of pragmatic expectations of rational discourse, like Grice's prescriptive maxims.

Maybe a telecommunications analogy would work, making reference to amplifiers \ repeaters \ broadcast stations that degrade a received signal if they fail to filter \ shape it to the characteristics of the retransmission channel.

"Rhetorical reenactment" sounds like "historical reenactment" and hints at the unproductive, not-directly-participatory role in the debate of the people sharing links.

I'm not sure whether to start a new comment thread on this, but a related phenomenon:

Blog A has a post about some subject. Blog B has a post that is mostly just recapitulating the points of Blog A, and links to Blog A. Blog C has a post also on the subject, and rather than linking to Blog A, links to Blog B. Blog D then comes along and links to Blog C, and so on, and so rather than a bunch of blog posts all linking to the original post, you have a chain of blogs citing blogs citing blogs citing blogs. (This sort of phenomenon shows up a lot of times when Snopes tries to research something, although often it's print media citing each other). I'm reminded of the phrase "it's turtles all the way down", and think of this as "turtle citing", although perhaps a more descriptive phrase would be "recursive citation".

Another related phenomenon is people using anchor text for their links that really doesn't reflect the actual link content.

This happens when the debaters' personal level of knowledge and expertise has been exceeded by external sources introduced to the debate. Essentially, then, each person is using an appeal to authority with different ideas of what level of authority their sources have, since it well beyond their abilities to verify their sources' arguments. Terms like Epistemic Closure in political contexts address the related phenomena of conflicting but self-consistent networks of authoritative sources.

I'd call the underlying issue an "Epistemic Divide"

No. When a word is used "simpliciter" all qualifications that are obviously necessary are implicit. So when somebody is said to be rational it means that with regards to the things that are relevant in the context that you are talking about they are more rational than the usual standard (probably most people, or most people in some group that is obvious from the context).

So the term you are looking for is "rational".

Rationality means more that one thing. One of the things it means is taking the pro-science, anti-god side in the Culture Wars. That may well be what it means when used as a binary.

I really wish there were some good term for the leftist flavor of anti-rationality.

There is one, and it's quite specific: Lysenkoism. If you mean something other than the historical movement based on Lysenko's theories, why not call it neo-Lysenkoism or something like that?